Thammasat University students who are interested in comparative literature, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, ethics, culture, folklore, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

Modern Luck: Narratives of fortune in the long twentieth century is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link.

The author is Professor Robert S. C. Gordon, who teaches Italian in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, the United Kingdom.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of luck.

Luck is the belief that success or failure apparently occurs by chance rather than through anyone’s actions. Luck may also be considered as a chance happening, or something that happens beyond a person’s control.

The publisher’s description of this comparative study on the role and function of luck in modern narrative explains:

Beliefs, superstitions and tales about luck are present across all human cultures, according to anthropologists. We are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history, and the modernity of the ‘long twentieth century’ is no exception to the rule. Apparently overshadowed by more conceptually tight, scientific and characteristically modern notions such as chance, contingency, probability or randomness, luck nevertheless persists in all its messiness and vitality, used in our everyday language and the subject of studies by everyone from philosophers to psychologists, economists to self-help gurus.

Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck’s presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Indeed, it argues that modern luck is constituted through narrative, through modern luck stories. Analysing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narrative taken from literature, film, music, television and theatre – from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, from Pinocchio to Cimino, from Curtiz to Kieślowski – it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

The book’s introduction observes:

The human universal of belief in luck can be tracked not only with an anthropologist’s eye on the rich variety and underlying affinities of human cultures in our world today, but also across the whole of human history and prehistory. There are vast bodies of ancient traditions of beliefs, talismans, religious and magical practices (religion and magic feature multiply in Brown’s list, and in all talk of luck) focussed obsessively on turning the violent uncertainties of the world towards propitious outcomes, harnessing contingency towards a lucky end and keeping bad luck at bay. These practices are elemental and primal, a matter of life and death, since warding off bad luck most often and immediately means warding off illness, starvation, violence or death; and attempting to attract the blessings of good luck most likely means dreaming of the birth of a child, the acquisition of wealth or simply enough food to survive, or perhaps even love and happiness. Luck practices look and have always looked to the essence of the good life, the life lived well or badly, not so much in the moral sense as in the material sense. Indeed, luck has a particularly awkward and thus fertile relationship with both morality and economy, as we will see repeatedly in this book.

All these practices and traditions have produced a remarkably rich iconography and material culture of luck, and these have left traces in the archaeological and historical record across the world, as well as in residual everyday beliefs. And they have also, crucially for our purposes here, bequeathed us their stories, legends and myths. The best-known stories of luck, in the Western tradition at least, centre on the deities of classical and ancient religion – ‘Tyche’ for the Greeks, ‘Fortuna’ for the Romans – and their associated visual culture.

Here are some thoughts about luck by authors, many of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.

• Roald Amundsen, The South Pole (1912)

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Some of you will be successful, and such will need but little philosophy to take them home in cheerful spirits; others will be disappointed, and will be in a less happy mood. To such, let it be said, “Lay it not too much to heart.” Let them adopt the maxim, “Better luck next time”; and then, by renewed exertion, make that better luck for themselves.

• Abraham Lincoln, in 1859 at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair

The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren’t and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

• Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.

• Nero Wolfe in The Rubber Band (1936) by Rex Stout

Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it.

• Douglas Jerrold, Jerrold’s Wit, Meeting Trouble Half-Way.

A lucky man is rarer than a white crow.

• Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), VII

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

• Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.

• Dalai Lama XIV

It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can’t. Anything more than that is luck.

• Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

• Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

The phrase “it’s better to be lucky than good” must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.

• Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)